Tomas McCabe

TOMAS MCCABE: HOW TO READ MINDS

☆☆☆☆

Whether due to the late timeslot on a Friday evening, the gentle Irish accent, Tomas McCabe’s invitation to learn secret knowledge in How to Read Minds, or the appeal and reputation of the performer himself, McCabe was able to gather a huge crowd on the day that his Fringe show was reviewed.  A popular regular, McCabe’s audiences have evidentially not been diminished by the overall slowdown of this post-pandemic Fringe.  He demonstrated exactly how he earned this renown over the course of his hourlong show. 

The flipside of this success is that McCabe was at times faced with a merry mob of chatty revelers rather than a nicely attentive audience.  He dealt with this as well as could reasonably be expected of him, by ignoring the interruptions other than to drown them out by pushing on with his show.  Luckily thanks to his projection coupled with his tech assistant’s help those who wished to follow along were perfectly able to.  Said tech assistant incidentally also emerged over the course of the hour as the current most eligible bachelor of this year’s Fringe.  Ladies, contact McCabe for his number. 

McCabe demonstrated his mind reading techniques on both the audience as a whole and on a select few individuals who were invited up to the stage.  Each method was equally impressive in its own right.  A highlight involved the use of audience members’ anonymized secret confessions to aid in the demonstration.  McCabe teased his audience, but from a place of nonjudgement.  The purpose of the exercise, aside from learning techniques to help trick people in to thinking you could read their mind, was to create a space for everyone to freely express their errors in judgement without undue negative reaction.  The teasing tone was dependent on the subject matter, when McCabe came across a confession that a member of his audience was planning on coming out to his parents the next day McCabe was quick to wish him luck with the conversation. The only trick that McCabe missed was due to an inebriated would-be participant forgetting her role, which he laughed off without embarrassing her. 

McCabe is one of the more popular Fringe magicians and earns it all the more with every show.  For a fun bit of mentalism, Fringe audiences cannot go wrong with McCabe. 

More information on Tomas McCabe and his performance dates can be found here.

TOMAS MCCABE: THE MIND READING EXPERIMENTS

☆☆☆☆

You wouldn’t expect it from someone with a face so young, but the moment Tomas McCabe steps on stage, he radiates a sense of authority. Maybe it’s just the lab coat, but McCabe’s energy and articulation immediately set the expectation that The Mind Reading Experiments is going to be a captivating show – and it does not disappoint.

The Mind Reading Experiments is both a historical exploration and a magic show, cloaked in the wonder of “obviously he can’t actually read our minds…but what if he can?” McCabe brings his audience into the 19th century spiritualism craze, where psychical abilities were tested and debated both in private, spiritual spheres and in scientific and intellectual ones. Key to his show are the Creery sisters, a group of five girls who claimed to have psychic powers, and the experiments that were done on them by scientists of the time to determine just how true that might be. But this show is not just about the past, it’s about today’s spectators too. McCabe claims that he’s going to teach us all how lies are discovered, minds are read, and much more. He bounces between different ways our minds work, from how we present body language that gives our true intentions away when trying to lie, to how propaganda and technology work on us. A glimpse inside the magic of the mentalists, we think, but McCabes’s skills prove far beyond any audience member’s powers of comprehension, and even when doing their best to catch him out, McCabe proves that he’s the smartest one in the room – or at least the most extrasensory.

McCabe mentions dropping out of school to follow the subjects that truly interested him, but it is clear that despite that, he certainly knows how to study. The Mind Reading Experiments is put together with by-the-book magic show perfection, from the overarching theme to the quick and neat cycling through audience participants. It is, if anything, a little too perfect, a little too perfunctory. At times audience members are brought onstage to do a quick task, be set dressing for a moment while McCabe provides framework for the next bit, and dismissed. This seems like a bit of a missed opportunity, because McCabe truly shines when he banters freely with his audience members, or is faced with a participant so excited to engage that they carve a bit of the show for themselves. McCabe is better at improvising than he thinks he is. Similarly, one simple but striking moment is his method of collecting slips of paper from the crowd – it’s unexpected, funny, and lightens the mood. McCabe is already head of the class when it comes to a well-constructed magic show, but once he feels the comfort to be more creative, he will be unstoppable.

The Mind Reading Experiments is a cleverly wrought and enjoyable magic experience. You may not come out of it with a lot more information about psychical abilities than you may have already known, as your teacher has no intention in letting his students outsmart him, but really you wouldn’t want to. Tomas McCabe makes it more fun to be baffled than you could ever have imagined.

 

More information about Tomas McCabe and his performance dates can be found here.

I CAN READ YOUR MIND

☆☆☆☆

Tomas McCabe has helpfully gone down the descriptive route in naming his Fringe show.  As his audiences descend into his basement venue, they definitely all know what to expect from McCabe in I Can Read Your Mind.  The large venue fills close to capacity, but McCabe’s warm and friendly stage presence draws in even those seated at the very back.

McCabe opens his show with a demonstration of his mind reading abilities, perfectly predicting the choices of his chosen audience member.  This allows him to quickly transition into a more practical application of mind reading, how to detect liars.  McCabe frames this as a lesson for the audience, pointing out what he is looking for as he detects successive participants’ attempted deceptions.  This lesson even comes with a test, as McCabe takes an audience poll to discover the final liar, adding a fun level of mass interaction to the show.

Another segment of the show features hypnotism, which McCabe introduces by asking all audience members who were open to being hypnotized to stand up so that he can do his best to put them in a trance.  It is comforting that he is open with his intentions and gives his audience the chance to abstain from this section, as surprise hypnotism can be alarming.  McCabe is respectful of the audience members who he does successfully hypnotize, including the one who he chooses to join him on stage to exhibit the depth of her trance.  However, McCabe’s hypnotic demonstrations are really just more mind reading.  This is not necessarily a criticism of his show, he is upfront about his specialty in its name, but it does make the hypnotism itself seem unnecessary.

I Can Read Your Mind is performed in a sizable, echoing venue, so at the performance reviewed, the audience was understandably noticeably concerned when McCabe’s microphone started cutting in and out.  McCabe dealt with this incredibly effectively, making jokes about the technical issues and ensuring that the entire audience could still hear what he was saying.  Luckily for the audience, McCabe was able to work through this complication and, when necessary, project his voice all the way to the back of the room.

I Can Read Your Mind is a worthy mind reading show, and is deservedly popular, as it manages to fill such a large venue.  McCabe’s lovely enthusiasm for getting the audience involved in every step of his mentalist tricks charms his audience and makes for an excellent and entertaining event.

 

I Can Read Your Mind can be found at Liquid Room Annexe (Venue 276) during the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe at 21:05 from August 20-26

More information on Tomas McCabe and his performance dates can be found here